Petrone, Town Council Dedicate Coral Park

Fitness-themed equipment highlights neighborhood park community long sought

Greenlawn, NY – Huntington Supervisor Frank P. Petrone and Town Council Members Susan A. Berland, Eugene Cook and Tracey A. Edwards joined community members June 20 in dedicating Coral Park, a long-awaited neighborhood park that was recently completed.

“This is a classic neighborhood park,” Supervisor Petrone said during the brief ceremony. “It’s walkable. People come in and out of it – people who live in the community and the neighborhood. It’s not just a park for the sake of having a park. It’s a park that is an integral part of everyone’s quality of life and everyone’s daily living. So that’s what makes us happy. That’s what it’s all about.”

Designed by Town staff, the 2.8-acre park has a playground, a basketball court, a pavilion and game tables and is an innovative, fitness-themed park. The playground is appropriate for both toddlers and youth and contains play zones that help develop upper body strength instead of the typical platforms and slides. An adult fitness area includes six fitness/cardio adult exercise play stations and a half-mile jogging path. For the less active, the pavilion/sitting area has picnic tables, a shade shelter and stone tables and chairs for playing chess, checkers and dominoes. The park includes a large open lawn area appropriate for a range of activities, from pickup ball games to kite flying.

Among the park’s extensive landscaping are 79 trees, 295 shrubs, 813 herbaceous plantings and an innovative “green” bio-swale for onsite drainage.

The park’s history dates back more than a decade, when a developer seeking subdivision approval was required to deed the land to the Town for an active park. It was the first time the Town Planning Board had required that dedicated land be used for active recreation.

Community input was central to the planning for the park. In fact, a Town Board resolution allocating funding from the Town’s Environmental Open Space and Park Improvement Fund (EOSPA) required community input as part of the planning process.

“We had numerous community meetings. We had battles back and forth, what should be there, what shouldn’t be there. Everyone came together. Everybody finally agreed it wasn’t about what it shouldn’t be, it was about what it should be. And this is a perfect example of how if we all work together, we can get something amazing done,” Councilwoman Berland said. “The Town Board fought hard for this park because we knew the community wanted this park, the community needed it.”

The total cost of the park was $855,000 -- $20,000 under budget – with $570,000 from the EOSPA Fund and $285,000 from the Neighborhood Parks Fund, which contains money contributed by developers as part of their approval process.

“I am so proud of this park,” Councilman Cook said. “People are always using it, and that’s the way it should be.”

Councilwoman Edwards, who recently joined the Town Board but who noted she used to live in the area, was already looking ahead to what she called Phase 2: possible additional amenities and traffic calming measures. “I am really glad that I can be part of Phase 2 of this park,” she said, “to ensure that this is not only a beautiful park, but the safest park possible.”